The Spectra Spectacle

Military and industrial demand for Spectra is, well, spectacular.  There are so many applications for the high-performance fiber that Honeywell is running flat-out to keep up.

by James A. Bacon

Dining at the Cheesecake Factory, a national chain of casual-but-upscale restaurants, can be a pleasure, but it wasn’t always easy working back in the kitchens. Kurt Leisure, director of risk services for the California company, noticed that food-preparation employees were cutting themselves with some frequency. The severity wasn’t a concern, but the “soft-dollar impact” was. “Anytime someone cuts their finger, you stop what you’re doing, discard the food, and send ‘em down to the clinic to get some stitches,” he says. “It’s detrimental to the flow of operations.” Not to mention morale.

The company had provided protective gloves, Leisure says, but inquiries showed that employees didn’t like using them. The bulky gloves cut down on their dexterity. Looking for a solution, the Cheesecake Factory turned to Double D Knitting, manufacturer of cut-resistant gloves laced with Spectra fiber which, on a comparative weight basis, is 10 times stronger than steel.

Despite some early reluctance, almost everyone wears the gloves now. “It’s really a thin material,” Leisure says. “Our staff loves it.” Lacerations are down by half. 

Spectra is best known as the super-fiber used in the Small Arms Protective Insert (SAPI) plates protecting American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan . Honeywell, Spectra’s developer, cited booming demand from the United States military and law enforcement agencies earlier this year as the reason for a $20 million expansion of its Spectra manufacturing facilities in Chesterfield County , in the Richmond, Va., region. But Spectra has numerous pacific uses, too. Honeywell has found diverse applications for the fiber from safety gloves to sailing cloth, dental floss to deep sea drilling equipment.

One of the most dynamic sectors in the chemical industry today, super fibers enjoy growing markets, attract significant capital investment and inspire a steady stream of new applications. Intense global competition – among Spectra’s rivals, DuPont’s Kevlar is the best known but Twaron and Zylon from Japan, Dyneema from the Netherlands, and M5 in the Richmond area are scrapping for market share – keeps the pressure on Honeywell to innovate continually.

The high-performance fiber operation in the Richmond region has been a star performer for the New Jersey-based Honeywell. In turn, the conglomerate has invested heavily to expand Spectra manufacturing capacity in recent years and in R&D to keep the product on the cutting edge -- or, in the case of the Cheesecake Factory, the cutting protection edge.

Honeywell has pushed the performance envelope at many different levels, asserts Mike Ryan, vice president of Performance Products. Since issuing the first patents about two decades ago, Honeywell has created two new generations of Spectra, each with superior characteristics. The company has boosted productivity of the manufacturing process that spins filament from a polymer raw material. And it has introduced innumerable refinements adapting the fiber to a wide variety of uses.

The business, says Ryan, “requires constant improvement and raising the bar by way of weight and strength and cost. You can’t stand still or somebody’s going to develop a better, cheaper product. It’s our strategy to continue to invest to make our processes and technology better.”

Honeywell’s commitment to innovation impresses Gene Winter, senior vice president of the Greater Richmond Partnership, the economic development organization for the Richmond, Va., region. Winter tracks the business as part of his job of promoting what is arguably the leading high-performance fiber cluster on the globe. Located only miles from Honeywell is DuPont’s Spruance plant, which manufactures Kevlar and Nomex, as well as the Magellan Systems pilot plant, which produces M5, potentially the strongest, lightest fiber yet developed.

Honeywell and DuPont are world-class companies, says Winter, but many of their older patents are expiring and new, low-cost competition is emerging – where else? -- in China. To maintain their market leadership, Winter says, the U.S. companies must refine their products continually, move up the learning curve in their manufacturing processes and systematically explore new applications.

“There’s an arcane body of knowledge associated with spinning these fibers and tweaking them to modify their properties – strength, weight, flexibility, elasticity and so on,” Winter says. “Richmond has a wealth of human capital, employees possessing knowledge you won’t find anywhere else in the U.S. We want to build on that expertise by recruiting research institutes, labs, textile weavers, body armor designers and other downstream users of the fiber. With companies like Honeywell here, we think we can be the world heavyweight champions in this field.”

Allied Signal Inc., which has since changed its name to Honeywell, introduced Spectra Fiber in the mid-1980s. A polyethylene fiber, the chemical possessed a carbon-to-carbon molecular structure resembling that of a diamond, giving it incredible strength. Yet it was light enough to float on water, and it showed tremendous resistance to chemicals, water and ultraviolet light. It resisted flex fatigue and held up under the stress of vibrations. And, because Spectra could be spun into a filament yarn, it could be woven into a textile or rope-like strands.

Allied Signal found an early market for Spectra in the field of body armor, a market that had been pioneered by DuPont’s Kevlar. As a fiber competing against other fibers — Honeywell asserts that its specific strength is 40 percent greater than aramids like Kevlar – Spectra can more than hold its own. But Honeywell leapfrogged the competition by devising a technique for laying parallel strands of the fiber side by side, holding them into place with a resin, cross-hatching the layers, and then fusing them into a composite.

This Spectra Shield technology opened up a new array of products. When multiple layers are used to back a thin ceramic plate, it creates the world’s most effective light-weight ballistic shield. U.S. soldiers wear two, four-pound plates – one for the chest, one in back – in their Interceptor body armor. The ceramic shatters bullets while the Spectra prevents the fragments from penetrating. Proven under harsh battlefield conditions, the technology has been phenomenally successful. It’s no exaggeration to say that the Interceptor vest, of which Spectra is a key component, has revolutionized infantry warfare.

The $20 million plant expansion announced in June is geared to supplying the North American armor industry, said Dr. Nance K. Dicciani, CEO of Honeywell Specialty Materials when the announcement was made. “Honeywell has invested more than $25 million in Spectra fiber research and production in the past three years. Today, we’re entering a new stage of development that will enable Honeywell to even further expand its support of the armor industry, to service new industry segments and to continue to drive innovation in specialty fibers."

Honeywell is pursuing other military applications using Spectra Shield as a substitute for steel armoring. The “up armoring” of light vehicles is an urgent priority in Iraq, where Humvees by the scores have fallen prey to IEDs, improvised explosive devices. Vehicle manufacturers are desperately developing kits that can be added onto existing vehicles. Some of these add-ons are made of steel, but by adding weighing down the vehicles, they hurt maneuverability and wear out engines and drive trains. At a fraction of the weight, Spectra Shield holds out the promise of offering significant ballistic protection at radically lighter weights.

Honeywell also is working directly with vehicle manufacturers to integrate their material into the design and manufacture of new vehicles, including Humvees, Strykers and Expeditionary Force Vehicles. Richmond researchers continue to refine Spectra Shield, seeking to reconfigure its fiber alignment and develop new resins to enhance its pliability and energy-absorbing properties.

Meanwhile the success of the Interceptor vests in protecting soldiers’ torsos has created a gruesome new need: As battlefield fatalities decline, the number of horrendous injuries to the arms and legs of bomb-blast survivors is increasing. Honeywell is exploring ways to extend protection to soldiers’ limbs as well.

Meeting the wartime needs of the U.S. military is Honeywell’s top priority, notes Ryan, the v.p. of performance products. The Richmond facility has been running its Spectra operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week to fulfill customer demand. But the success of Spectra Shield on the battlefield makes it tough to keep up. The Pentagon is shipping tens of thousands of armored vests to Iraq to equip soldiers in the new Iraqi army, while foreign militaries cover them as well. “We anticipate that we will be able to take the Spectra Shield to other militaries throughout the world,” says Ryan, “Although none of those deals have been finalized, we have an active interest in doing that.”

To supply other markets, the company indicated it expects to make “several similar-sized investments” over the next few years in addition to the recent $20 million expansion in the Richmond region.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution faced special challenges when designing a machine capable of boring into the deep ocean floor for the purpose of studying ancient sediment. The “piston corer,” capable of drilling 160 feet into the seabed, weighs 25,000 pounds and must be capable of working in depths of up to 20,000 feet. The trick was finding a way to lower and raise the metal monster: Steel cable delving nearly four miles into the abyss would stretch and weaken over time, while salt water would corrode it.

The Woods Hole scientists turned to a high-tech rope using Spectra as a key material. Not only is the fiber 10 times stronger than steel on a comparable-weight basis, but because Spectra is lighter than water, its full strength will be available to support the load. Steel and fiber ropes, by contrast, must bear their own weight in addition to the working load. As a bonus, Spectra is immune to the corrosive effects of salt water, doesn’t stretch or weaken under heavy loads, and remains flexible over time.

Deep-sea boring machines don’t exactly constitute a mass market, but broader maritime markets do. Demand is larger and growing for high-performance fibers like Spectra for use as ropes, cables and tow lines.

The potential application that most excites Honeywell executives is for deep-sea oil platforms. One of the main constraints on drilling in deep water is the strength of the steel cables used to stabilize mooring rigs on the surface. At certain depths, cables can literally break under their own weight. Substituting Spectra for steel could solve the problem for oil companies, as it apparently will for Woods Hole's  deep-sea coring machine.

Says Ryan: “The deeper they go, the longer the cable goes, the better [the oil companies] like it.” In theory, at least. Because oil companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a single drilling platform, they are extremely risk averse. “There’s a lot of safety testing and verification,” says Ryan. “The people who own this equipment have to make sure they’re not creating problems for themselves.”

The oil industry adoption rate for new technology is slow as a consequence. But Honeywell executives exude enough confidence in their product to hint at size of the potential market. “If our product gets adopted in a lot of these offshore mooring rigs,” says Ryan, “the oil industry could actually surpass the armor market over a period of four or five years.”

Potential applications are limited only by the human imagination. The Pentagon is toying with the idea of building a fleet of helium air ships – blimps with Spectra skins -- and loading them up with sensors, video cameras and wireless communications. These floating observation posts could sit offshore and monitor the U.S. coastline, or drift above a convoy in Iraq and inspect the road ahead for ambushes.

Fishermen are using fishing lines made of Spectra. The line’s strength and light weight allows anglers to cast longer distances, and it doesn’t make a bird’s nest of the angler’s reel. Sports enthusiasts value Spectra line for its strength and minimal stretch, traits that are particularly important in power kites. Wake-boarders love Spectra lines because they have no “bungee” effect and they float on the water’s surface. The fiber is used as well in camping guy-lines, yacht sails and extreme sports apparel.

“We get more interesting ideas than we can handle,” Ryan says. Honeywell listens to its customers, evaluates the size of the potential market and analyzes how well a potential application matches up with Spectra’s competitive advantages. On the one hand, Spectra has superior performance characteristics; on the other, it’s more expensive to manufacture than aramid fibers. “Those applications that require extremely high strength and low weight go to Spectra,” Ryan says. “If you’re trading off cost, you go to another solution.”

Looking to the future, the sky’s the limit. Some of the most exciting research is taking place at the Natick Soldiers Center in Massachusetts, where scientists are working on radical concepts in body armor. Developing new materials at the nano level – one billionth of a meter – may create entirely new properties. Other researchers envision “smart” materials, in which high-performance fibers are interwoven with fiber-optic sensors that adjust the material’s coloring, temperature or pressure.

While focused mainly on markets, production and the bottom line, Honeywell is willing to push the frontier of technology, Ryan says. “We put a percentage of our time and resources into wild ideas. We do some blue-sky thinking. We try to be creative. We’re always looking for ways to innovate."

-- August 13, 2004